Thanks to Mihai for his presentation at the November 28th IBM SmartCloud Enterprise Developers Group Virtual Meeting on the topic Recover virtual machine instances using QEMU. The playback is available via the Internet at

Presentation: Recover virtual machine instances using QEMUA meeting for SCE customers and users of the REST APIs and related tools to develop solutions on the cloud. Previously known as the API Users Group.

About this groupThe IBM SmartCloud Enterprise Developers Group (previously API User Group) is a technical community composed of individuals interested in the application programming interfaces (APIs) of the IBM SmartCloud Enterprise offering. The group includes customers, IBM Business Partners, independent software vendors, and IBM employees who share a common interest in understanding the APIs of the IBM SmartCloud Enterprise offering and how they can be used to automate processes and build solutions that integrate with IBM SmartCloud Enterprise.

The IBM SmartCloud Developers Group is hosted by Alex Amies. Alex is a Senior Software Engineer in the GTS Development Lab team. He has been with IBM since 2002. His current assignment is Architect with the design team for the IBM SmartCloud Enterprise public cloud offering at ibm.com/cloud/enterprise. Alex has been working in the China Development Lab in Beijing since 2009. Prior to 2009 Alex was product architect for IBM Tivoli Identity Manager, based in Costa Mesa, California.

Abstract:This article will give
readers a deeper understanding of cloud storage. It explains the use of
remotely and dynamically attached storage volumes on SmartCloud
Enterprise for Linux systems. Firstly, we demonstrate some basic
principles of block storage on Linux. Following that we show how to
manage and make use of remote attached storage volumes on SCE in an
extended scenario for whole volume back-up that makes use of the SCE
command line tool for creating, dynamically attaching, and cloning to
another storage availability area. This article will be useful to anyone
wanting to use the cloud to store data.

I have adapted the steps from the article IBM SmartCloud Enterprise tip: Configure the Linux Logical Volume Manager (Mihai Criveti, 2012) and simplified for use on a dynamically attached volume on RHEL 6.2 on SCE. Refer to the previous blog for background. I perform these steps after creating a RHEL 6.2 virtual machine instance and dynamically attaching a 60 GiB storage volume.

In this article by Mihai Creveti you can understand how to use the Linux Logical Volume Manager on SmartCloud Enterprise. The Linux Logical Volume Manager (LVM) supports the concepts of physical volumes (PVs), volume groups (VGs), and logical volumes (LVs). A volume group is a collection of physical volumes and can be partitioned into logical volumes. Logical volumes act like physical volumes and have the advantage that they are not limited by physical restrictions, like hard disk space and can be managed dynamically. For example, LVM enables you to dynamically re-size volumes if you are running out of space. This can be very important when planning for and working with child instances so that you do not bake the disk size decisions for child instances into a parent image.

Some useful commands explained in the article, including lvmdiskscan, vgcreate, lvcreate, and fdisk. You can use lvmdiskscan to scan the devices visible to LVM, as shown below.

The -N imageName option specifies the name of the image to search for. Because multiple images in the the catalog can conceivably have the same name, say for different data centers, the return result can bring back a list of matches. Enclose the name in double quotes if it contains spaces or special characters.

The REST flavor of this API is

GET <base_URL>/offerings/image/?imageName=<imageName>

The equivalent Java API is defined on the DeveloperCloudClient interface is

List<Image> describeImages(String name)

User managementThere are provisional API's now available for adding and deleting user.